– Goddard child sex abuse inquiry: What to expect as hearings begin
– Former MI5 chief ‘involved in child sex abuse cover-up’
– Enoch Powell named by bishop in police sex abuse probe
– Report: Key Vatican aide investigated for child abuse
Australian police are investigating Vatican finance chief George Pell over sexual abuse allegations
Goddard child sex abuse inquiry: What to expect as hearings begin
Jul 27, 2016
Multi-million pound investigation will see churches, police and individuals put under the spotlight
Preliminary hearings have begun in the long-awaited inquiry into historic child sexual abuse.
The independent investigation, chaired by New Zealand high court judge Dame Lowell Goddard, is the largest ever undertaken in Britain, with speculation that it could last for up to a decade.
What will the inquiry look at?
“The inquiry is unprecedented in both size and scope,” says Goddard. With a first-year budget of £17.9m and 155 staff members, it will focus on whether public bodies and other non-state institutions have failed in their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse in England and Wales.
The police, health service, the Crown Prosecution Service and religious bodies will all be put under the spotlight during the hearings. At the end of the investigation, Goddard and her colleagues promise to demand accountability, support victims and make recommendations for the future.
“There is no doubt that the inquiry’s task is immense,” Goddard recently wrote in The Guardian. “But the scale and magnitude of the problem of child sexual abuse means there is no easy fix. This is the opportunity to get to the heart of one of the biggest challenges for our generation.”….Former MI5 chief ‘involved in child sex abuse cover-up’
23 July 2015
The former head of Britain’s intelligence service urged the government to cover up allegations of child sexual abuse against a senior MP, freshly uncovered documents have revealed.
Writing to cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong in 1986, MI5 director general Sir Antony Duff said “the risk of political embarrassment to the government is rather greater than the security danger”.
The correspondence was about an unnamed MP who was alleged to have “a penchant for small boys,” but Duff said he accepted the politician’s denial of the abuse.
The documents, originally thought to have been lost or destroyed, were discovered in a Cabinet Office storeroom of “assorted and unstructured papers,” The Times reports.
The discovery comes months after an official review into whether allegations of child abuse were covered up by the Home Office in the 1980s found no evidence that records were deliberately removed.
However, in a supplementary report “quietly” released yesterday, the authors of the report condemned the government’s record keeping and called for an extensive search of Whitehall archives.
The freshly unearthed files also include documents about senior Westminster figures including Margaret Thatcher’s former parliamentary secretary Sir Peter Morrison, former home secretary Leon Brittan, and former minister Sir William van Straubenzee. The contents of those documents have not been revealed.
There are also papers relating to former MI6 chief Sir Maurice Oldfield and his alleged connection to the abuse scandals at the Kincora boys’ home in Northern Ireland….Enoch Powell named by bishop in police sex abuse probe
30 March 2015
A Church of England bishop has reported Enoch Powell to police investigating allegations of a Westminster paedophile network.
The claims against the late Conservative MP, who made the infamous Rivers of Blood speech, are said to relate to “ritual satanic abuse” and were reported to a clergyman by a young person during a counselling session in the 1980s.
The information was passed on to the Bishop of Durham, Paul Butler, who is responsible for “safeguarding” in the Church of England. He reported Powell to the police last year, but is not thought to have had any corroborating material.
Powell’s supporters have described the allegations as “absolute nonsense”….http://www.theweek.co.uk/goddard-inquiry/59321/goddard-child-sex-abuse-inquiry-what-to-expect-as-hearings-begin

Report: Key Vatican aide investigated for child abuse
Australian police are investigating Vatican finance chief George Pell over sexual abuse allegations, according to the Australian national broadcaster ABC. The cardinal denied the claims as “totally untrue.”
Complaints against Pell go back to late 1970s, when he served as a priest in his home town of Ballarat, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported on Wednesday.
Two men told the company that Pell molested them in a Ballarat swimming pool when they were children. Another person alleged that he had seen Pell exposing himself to young boys in a beach changing room in the 1980s.
ABC claims it had obtained eight police statements from the alleged victims, witnesses and family members. Police and prosecutors have yet to decide whether the documents warrant formal charges against the 75-year old cardinal, according to the reporters.
‘Smear campaign’
Victoria police declined to comment, according to the AFP news agency.
At the same time, Pell accused ABC of running a “scandalous smear campaign” against him.
“The cardinal does not wish to cause any distress to any victim of abuse,” his Rome office said in a statement. “However, claims that he has sexually abused anyone, in any place, at any time in his life are totally untrue and completely wrong.”
Pell already faced allegations of pedophilia in 2002, but was later cleared of any wrongdoing. He also came under fire earlier this year, when the authorities probed numerous child abuse cases in Australia….http://www.dw.com/en/report-key-vatican-aide-investigated-for-child-abuse/a-19430249